


The Procedure

by merripestin



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Abortion, Gen, Original Character(s), Strexcorp, violation of bodily autonomy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-19
Updated: 2014-06-19
Packaged: 2018-02-05 09:26:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1813516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merripestin/pseuds/merripestin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A couple StrexCorp doctors help out at the Night Vale branch of Planned Parenthood.</p><p> </p><p>  <i>The procedure turned out to be a lot messier, using the Desert Bluffs methodology.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	The Procedure

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LuxObscura](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LuxObscura/gifts).



> Thanks to LuxObscura for the idea of Planned Parenthood in Night Vale.
> 
> [note that the medicine in this fic is at Night Vale-typical levels of scientific inaccuracy]

Sometimes angels line the walk outside the Night Vale branch of Planned Parenthood.  They stare radiantly at the people walking into the clinic.  They stare radiantly also at the people who come with placards and screams to protest the people walking into the clinic.  The angels express no opinion, they simply stare.  They smile, but angels smile all the time.

When Dr. Casey Jefferson went in at eight in the morning, there were no angels present, and the current bunch of placards read:

 

**ADOPTION IS AN OPTION -- CONSIDER THE PERSONNEL NEEDS OF A VAGUE YET MENACING GOVERNMENT AGENCY**

**MY TAXES SHOULD NOT PAY FOR YOUR SPIDERBABIES**

**ITS AN OFFSPRING OF INDETERMINATE PHYLUM NOT A CHOICE**

and

**ABORTION STOPS A GLISTENING BLOOD-BLOATED THUMPING BEATING BEATING BEATING HEART STOP IT STOP IT STOP STOP STOP**

 

The angels had left a message in letters of fire on the Please Don't Litter Or Overlook the Influence of External Forces sign above the trash can by the main entrance.  But since citizens were legally unaware of the existence of angels,  the heavenly alphabets had been an elective only, and Casey, in preparation for med school, had sensibly taken a class on forestry instead.

So Casey walked by the celestial warning, unable to read it -- except that it was signed _-Erika_ \-- and got to work.

Two prescriptions for birth control, one prostate screening, one ultrasound revealing a very healthy set of conjoined twin girls that had the mother already crowing about her little football stars to be -- Michael Sandero had set up some very unreasonable expectations for the next generation of bicranial youth -- and a pap smear later, it was finally lunchtime.

In the waiting area, two teenage girls were debating, by means of emphatic gestures and an exchange of flowers, the merits of tubal ligation.  It annoyed Casey, slightly, not being able to remember whether forsythia symbolized sunk cost fallacy… or was that jonquil?

In a corner sat a very old man wearing an enormous pair of bright magenta Dr. Dre headphones plugged into a small clockwork model of Nashville, nodding his head briskly to the ticking.

Everyone else was looking at magazines.   _Overdue Conversations With Strangers Monthly_ was popular as ever, but Casey was happy to see that _They_ and _Popular Harmonics_ were getting their share of readers.

Darice Adams, the new nurse practitioner, walked into the waiting room at the same time as Casey and widened her eyes humorously at the crowd.  They were very shorthanded.  Arnold Gupta was out for a week chaperoning a girl scout camping trip during which his daughter was likely to be inducted into the Order of Unseemly Trees and earn her Accounting merit badge, and Millicent Harold was off for the day doing a historical re-enactment of The Time Everyone Forgot Dolores Chan's Birthday.  That left Casey the only regular doctor.  Plus, Toby Kim, one of the usual NP's, was out still recovering from a case of squirrels (a bit embarrassing for someone whose job involved STD treatment, Casey thought).

Mandy Rhodes, the receptionist, held up a finger as Casey walked by.  She was on the phone, writing down a new appointment.  When she put it down, she stuck her pen back into her hair and applied the post-it note she'd written on to the screen of her computer monitor.  It was half covered over in yellow paper.  "Meredith's going for sandwiches," she said.  "You want anything?"

That was Mandy's way of saying the NPs were going to riot if Casey left for lunch while they were this busy.

"Weren't we supposed to be borrowing a doc and a PA from Desert Bluffs?" Casey asked, quiet so the waiting patients wouldn't hear.  "If we leave these folks waiting too long they might get bored and start swapping STDs."

"On their way.  They'll be here for the afternoon."

"Order me a fried pickle sub," Casey said, resigned.  "Who's next?"

Next was what turned out to be early-onset menopause with psycho-meteorological manifestations.  When that was done with, the sandwich was waiting, and just to feel that not quite the whole day had been spent inside the clinic, Casey headed for the door to eat outside.

"Sheriff's secret police are out there,"  Mandy warned, nodding at the door.

"Again?"  Sighing, Casey walked out.

Night Vale was a small town, but Casey didn't know everyone by name.  Two of the placardeers today were Ashley and Alexander Dawson.  They were always there.  They tried to give out cards with their name and contact numbers to everyone who went into the clinic, and most of those went straight into the recycling, or ended up being used as emergency scratch paper when Mandy was out of post-its, so Casey knew the names well.

The one who was confused about the relationship between his taxes and spiderbabies wasn't a regular.  Casey would have remembered the untreated case of tertiary elbows.

The fourth was a regular, though Casey didn't know his name.  "It's a loud kinda sound!"  he was calling up to the blue helicopter hovering silently above him.  "Like a metronome wrapped in gunny sacks.  It's getting louder!  It's getting louder!"

Casey didn't so much mind the process itself, but the silent wind raised by the helicopter ruined even the best hair day.  Casey leaned against the wall of the clinic, eating fried pickle on a long rye bun, trying to at least keep the sandwich from getting any braids blown into it.

"Here it is!  Here it is!"  the guy with the placard was screaming.  "Don't pretend you didn't know!  It's a heart!  A beating, beating, beating heart!"

One heart? thought Casey.  He'd be lucky.  They put down humane traps, of course, but the little bastards kept multiplying. Why this guy felt he had to keep bringing them to the attention of the sheriff's office, Casey couldn't think.  It wasn't as if he was going to get the clinic shut down on health grounds -- the clinic itself was clean, and nobody really expected them to keep down the nuisance organ population in the secret compartments under the sidewalk outside.  They weren't technically allowed to know about them, after all.

By the time Casey was done with lunch, the heart guy had settled into a peaceful howling and been led off by kindly passing hooded figures, who promised to take him home.  The police helicopter eventually hovered silently away.  

Two Segways hummed around the corner where the smoking remains of the newly opened Open Your Pie Hole Pizza Parlor stood, and came up the street to park neatly just where the angels usually stood.  Each was trailing a little capsule on wheels, like a motorcycle sidecar.

The men on them were wearing plasticy transparent overcoats with face masks, and the coats and the masks and the Segways and the capsules each had a bright sunburst logo that said _StrexCorp_.  So, the relief troops had arrived.

When they'd parked their little vehicles, they peeled the coats and masks off over their heads and peeled off transparent booties Casey hadn't noticed as well.  Underneath were two slim neat men with very shiny hair and very shiny shoes.  They unhooked their capsules and wheeled these along after them.

As Casey tossed the sandwich wrapper into the trash bin under the still-glowing angelic warning, the two walked up to the clinic, smiling huge shiny grins in no particular direction.

Casey stepped forward.  "Hi.  I'm Dr. Jefferson -- Casey.  You're the docs from Desert Bluffs?"

The first shiny man shook Casey's hand vigorously.  "Hi there!  Great to meet you!" he said.

"This is Dr. French," said the second man.  "I'm Dr. Wen."

"Oh, two docs.  Great!  I thought we were getting an assistant.  It's so great of you to offer to do this."

"Oh, Dr. Wen was happy to come," Dr. French said.  "See, last week his kid -- brightest little guy you ever saw, wow, what a great kid! -- had a softball game.  Just little kids, you know how they are at that age, so into the sport!  Well, it ran over by an hour, so of course he was just pleased as hell for the opportunity to make up for that lost efficiency by helping out in your little town!"

"I sure was!"

Casey held the door for them.  "Well, yeah, okay, great.  Sorry it's such a madhouse."

"Can't have this!" said Dr. Wen, looking around.  "All these people waiting.  Think of the productivity cost!"

Casey introduced them to Mandy.  "She'll get you set up."

Mandy handed over a couple files to each of them and showed them the layout.  "Have you two plowing right through the chlamydia in no time," she said with a smile.

"Have you been mixing up the case notes, Miss Rhodes?" Dr. French asked, his wide shiny grin stiffening around the corners as he looked at the files.  "I don't see -- "

"Kidding," Mandy said, giving Casey a look.

"Well," Casey said, "Great to have you on board.  Let me know if you need to ask where anything is."

"Oh, we've brought our own equipment," said Dr. French, patting his little rolling capsule. "We're  just used to that cutting edge StrexCorp feel, I guess.  Better show my next patient how much more efficient she can be with less trichomoniasis and more Strex in her life!"  He called the name off his first file and led away a waiting middle-aged woman in a sleeveless green dress that left her proud librarian scars visible to the world.  

Dr. Wen collected one of the teenage girls, who got in the last flower by throwing a nasturtium over her shoulder sarcastically as she left the room. 

"Chipper, aren't they?" Casey said, when the other doctors were gone.

Mandy smirked.  "Little rays of desert sunshine, both of 'em.  But Darice'll kiss their feet when she finds out she and Meredith can actually stop to eat."

The first appointment of the afternoon was Eduardo Pena, who had just started his first period.  He was eleven and extremely annoyed about having to skip basketball practice for this.  Casey presented him with the usual set of three medical grade sanitary napkins printed with images of popular cartoon characters -- The Amazing Eggbeater, Fluffy the Teatime Headache, and Mrs. Entrails -- and, to cheer him up, told him about the new, adult feelings he might soon find himself experiencing,  for instance a small but persistent itch under the toenail that you could only feel when sitting in a very serious meeting when you needed to make a good impression.  

After that, two routine checkups, and then came Mrs. and Mrs. Cavanaugh's second termination appointments, back after the methotrexate injections and autohypnotic recordings Casey had given them on Monday.

Ordinarily, a little clinic like theirs just did referrals for abortion, but the Cavanaughs were longtime patients, and had asked Casey to see it through with them.  

After spending several years trying to get pregnant, they'd turned to fertility treatments.  Casey had, of course, told them the risks, so they had known that in clinical trials the rites of The Great Fecund Mothercreature were found to result in repeat implantations 2-3% of the time.  But no one ever really expected to find themselves in the 2-3%.  As far as Casey knew, this was the first case of repeated simultaneous repeat implantations in a married couple recorded by medical science.  Their six previous children were growing up well and happy, but they had chosen to stop here.

"What's that?" Dr. French asked, catching Casey in the hallway outside the Cavanaughs' room..

"Misoprostol," Casey explained.

"Misoprostol?  Really?  Ha, ha," Dr. French said.  He popped his head into a side room.  "You have to see this, Dr Wen," he said.  "They're still using misoprostol!"

Dr. Wen came out, wiping something orange and viscous off his gloves.  "Misoprostol?  Well!  I guess it's just a little old fashioned around here."

Casey frowned at them.  "What would you use instead?"

"Oh, we have a great little device from StrexCorp.  Triggers uterine contractions without any nasty chemicals.  Most tissue expelled within the first five minutes, and usually completes by the next day.  Much more tidy!"

"Oh," said Casey.  On the one hand, misoprostol was an established treatment.  On the other hand, it could take a while and sometimes needed more than one dose.  It might be worth seeing whether the alternative treatment was workable.  Even if Casey found the source of it a bit grating.

Casey left it up to Mrs. and Mrs. Cavanaugh.  The promise of a quicker resolution swung them, so Casey agreed to have Dr. French perform the procedure with Casey observing.

Dr. French used StrexCorp sedation followed by StrexCorp local anaesthesia.  While Casey was wearing the usual sterile horned helmet and goggles, Dr French put on only a sunshine yellow lab coat and a sunshine yellow gas mask.  He also didn't join in the usual pre-operative chanting, but did pull Dr. Wen into the room briefly for a team-building song about the wonders of Strex before they began.  Mrs. and Mrs. Cavanaugh, both a bit loopy with the drugs, tried to sing along.  

The StrexCorp branded equipment had the usual articulated gleaming spines, but otherwise wasn't at all familiar to Casey.  The controls were decidedly red, wet, and squishy.

The procedure turned out to be a lot messier, using the Desert Bluffs methodology.  There was a lot more blood, for one thing, but since it didn't appear to be coming from either of the Mrs. Cavanaughs, Casey wasn't unduly concerned.

Partway through, Dr. Wen knocked urgently on the door to call Casey to speak with Her Holiness Tricia von Hesse, who he had somehow given the impression that her IUD had become unblessed.

As Casey was coming back, she passed Dr. French in the hallway.  "All done!" he sang out cheerily.  "Afraid we'll have to be going now.  Need to beat the traffic and be back in Desert Bluffs in time for the evening Ceremony of Strex and Community Togetherness.  Bye now!"

And he was gone.

At least when Casey went in, the room had been left entirely clean, as if every scrap of extra organic matter had been sucked away.  Mrs. and Mrs. Cavanaugh were resting side by side, smiling dopily, so Casey left them there, told Meredith to check on them in half an hour, and went to the next patient.

 

* * *

 

So, listeners, we'll be looking forward to more robot singing telegrams and robot singing court summonses and robot singing death threats in days to come.  

In other news, Night Vale's Planned Parenthood clinic remains closed in the wake of the malpractice suit brought against  Dr. Casey Jefferson by Mrs. and Mrs. Cavanaugh.  Now, I've seen Wyatt, the titanium scorpionbaby that Mrs. Cavanaugh -- the blind one, not the tall one -- gave birth to after what was supposed to be a routine termination, and I agree, it sure seems to exist, and if Mrs. Cavanaugh says it came out of her, well, she and Mrs. Cavanaugh -- the tall one, not the blind one -- and Dr. Millicent Harold were there, they should know.  

But I think we have to also consider the community.  What about Mandy Rhodes, the clinic receptionist?  And Darice Adams, Meredith Oxblood, and Toby Kim, the nurse practitioners?  What about professional picketers Ashley and Alexander Dawson, now deprived of their life's work and reduced to attending Mayor Pamela Winchell's press conferences and calling her a degenerate hussy -- a far cry from former glories?  What about Dr. Arnold Gupta, who I'm sure will return from the wilderness someday?  

Our town, like the colonies of carnivorous flying ants recently installed next to the sandbox in Grove Park, may seem to be made up of wholly separate individuals, but it is only in our combination, in our community, that we can form the voracious all-devouring mass that can strip the sweet flesh from the bountiful life we are given.

I congratulate Mrs. and Mrs. Cavanaugh on finding an adoptive family in a nearby town who are prepared to survive Wyatt the scorpionbaby.  Hopefully now the other Cavanaugh children can emerge from protective custody -- currently being provided, of course, by the pediatric branch of a vague, yet menacing government agency.  And I know that the Night Vale Secret Courts will bring forth a silent and unexplained judgement in this case.  But whether or not we ever see Dr. Casey Jefferson again as a flesh-wearing human whose brain has not been confiscated by the state, I hope that Night Vale's Planned Parenthood will reopen soon to serve us all.

Good night, Night Vale.  Good night.

 


End file.
